Thoughts on Karaoke

Yes. Karaoke.

Not something I expected to ever have experience in, and therefore not something I ever thought about (except that I loved Bill Murray's Lost in Translation).

So it was somewhat surprising to be annoyed when, at what turned out to be midnight, the staff of the UC Presidential Postdoc retreat at UCLA's Lake Arrowhead conference center turned on a sound system, thereby ending karaoke night.

Beginning at the beginning: my third UCOP Postdoc is currently in his second (and last) year. One of the commitments in these mentored fellowships has been to come to two events a year: a day-long conference held at the Oakland Airport Hilton; and this weekend retreat.

I hate things that are scheduled by my job that assume I am available evenings or weekends. So it has not bothered me that in the previous four years (the most recent postdocs overlapped for one year) I have not made it to the weekend retreat. My reason was a good one: it has traditionally been held in spring, coinciding with the archaeology professional meetings. Not just me, but at times my postdocs, were better occupied being at that meeting.

But with the budget crisis, last year the program held only the fall meeting in Oakland, and this year, they moved the retreat into the fall term and dropped the fall meeting. (So effectively, the current postdocs participate in the same two events over the course of a two year period, although not in a uniform order as before.)

So, with the weekend retreat in fall, and my latest postdoc at the point where we need another campus to consider hiring him (one of the goals of the program is to diversify the faculty at UC by keeping promising young PhDs in the system as new professors), I gritted my teeth and let myself be kidnapped and held prisoner.

Excuse me. I mean I went to spend two days in intimate, all day forced contact with strangers.

Let's try again. I journeyed with a group of like-minded people to a rousing revival meeting in which we reaffirmed our common commitments to teaching, mentoring, and research.

And remarkably, that last one seems to be true. There are unexpected beauties to being in the company of like-minded strangers. I hate eating breakfast in public with people I don't know (I do not wake up well). But I met wonderful people, even at breakfast.

So by the evening, when I came to the room for our keynote address by a former postdoc, I happily signed on the karaoke list: after all, why come to an event like this and try to avoid the artificial bonding opportunity? And at least this wasn't any artificial trust exercise involving blindfolds.

(The speaker's current research is looking at murders in the Phillipines that are attributed to disputes about signing "My Way" in karaoke bars, which she relates to masculinity and power. Not sure I quite buy the arguments...)

After the talk and discussion, it turned out I was one of only two brave souls to have volunteered. I played it cautious, and went for Willy Nelson's "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" (which has a vocal range of about 3 notes).

The set up was not ideal: we were using the speaker's computer as the karaoke machine, with the words projected on a screen in front of the room, so you had to stand either with your back to the room or sideways (I chose sideways).

And as someone who had never done this weird thing before, I have to say I found the way the words were projected confusing: two lines were posted, highlighted word by word; as you finished the top line, and went on to line 2, the top line was replaced by the third line. This really, really confused me: linear order is apparently important in my lyrics, if nothing else. (I think it was especially confusing because the screen changed from lines 1-2 to lines 3-2 to lines 3-4, 5-4, 5-6 etc. Can you tell I have been dwelling on this?)

But even worse: there was a score at the top of the screen! and I only scored 74!

UNLEASH THE OVER-ACHIEVER!!!

When the next (and only other) volunteer went ahead, with polish, panache, and a good voice (and, I intuit, experience) and registered a 94, I had to return to the scene of the crime.

I will spare you a song by song narrative. (I couldn't do it, anyway; that's an indication of how enthusiastically I threw myself into the game.) I analyzed what others were doing as the score went up and down, and deduced that being on key mattered not a bit; even singing the right words seemed to be unimportant. But making sounds at the same rate as the words were highlighted-- now that, the karaoke machine liked.

The culmination of my night was not, alas, "My Way". That would have made this a perfect story. (And to be honest, I thought about it but then they turned off the machine...) Personally, I enjoyed "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" the most; others enjoyed a song I can no longer remember the title of but let's just say was a tad more suggestive than I remembered.

Only about half a dozen of us participated in any way. Both of my postdocs in attendance-- one in her first year as assistant professor, and the afore-mentioned second-year postdoc-- made token efforts, singing back-up to avoid what they clearly feared would be my insistence on them singing alone. (I wouldn't actually have forced them to sing, and it is illuminating how they assumed that, even after knowing me for more than a year each.)

Karaoke in a pine lodge seems sort of exotic. Karaoke at all fascinates me: I can sing, but I do not think that my singing in this context was at all good. You cannot choose a key, so you are stuck with what the machine does; loud gets better scores than style; and I found myself semi-shouting and alternating between a falsetto and my increasingly deep natural voice.

And it did not create any kind of community. There was a bar at the end of the room, and the fellows (and a few brave faculty) surged back there and hovered in the semi-darkness in apparent desire to avoid being noticed. (Clarification: my drink of choice all night was ice water.) Most of the faculty slipped out after the talk. The director of the program kept explaining to me and anyone who was listening that last time (two years ago) people were happy to participate, and that they had a lot of people who were part of bands then. So I think this was a failure as a bonding exercise.

But: I got a lot better idea of what motivates people to spend hours pretending to sing old standards to a pre-recorded music track. And I think I could even understand coming to violence, say, if someone else sang "My Way" her way, and the machine, in its infinite detachment, gave it a higher score.

I, by the way, ended the night with a 96 score on my best effort-- and yes, that was the high score.